Strike a Pose (1993) day two. As you remember from yesterday, Robert Eastwick is a suspended cop, who shot a young women in a convenience store hold-up. The deputy DA, who is now seeing his ex, Michelle Garrin who is also a cop, has managed to get him placed on desk duty, claiming that he used excessive force. His girlfriend, Michele Brin, is an ex fashion model turned photographer. Yesterday, we saw tons of models from three photo shoots.

It is misleading to go on and on about the plot, as very little screen time was devoted to it, but here goes. A convicted rapist put away by Eastwick is turned loose pending a retrial, and has sworn revenge on those who arrested him. His girlfriend, Tamara Landry, picks him up from jail, has a gun and smokes ready, then takes him to a hotel to fuck his brains out. Eastwick's partner is run over by a hit and run driver, and everything points to the rapist, who, they think, is after anyone Eastwick likes.

They carefully introduce another character, a new assistant to Brin, who has no real function in the plot. So much for the surprise ending. Brin shows breasts and buns in three long sex scenes. Garrin shows breasts and buns trying to seduce Eastwick, and then breasts with her husband. Landry shows breasts and buns in a long sex scene, and Jeanine Antoine and Sindy Tennes, as two models, have a lengthy girl-girl, showing lots of breast and some good lesbian kisses.

Acting was nearly universally poor, with the exception of Michelle Garin, who was quite competent. It is puzzling that she has no other credits, as she was good enough to merit more work. IMDB readers have this at 2.7 of 10. Comments range from "trashy nothing garbage" to great mindless T & A. Both are probably fair. Unfortunately, this is a very early DVD, and is undersaturated and very grainy. All of the women wore crotch patches in sex scenes. They are especially obvious in the first few images of Landry. This film is a C-, mainly due to the poor image quality, as it certainly delivers on the T & A, and I have seen worse plots.

The critics seem to have noticed a lovely wardrobe
here,
but the people have a different view of Emperor Soderbergh's new
clothes. Verdict: naked.

The following charts represent exit
interview scores given by moviegoers to the pollsters at Cinema Score.

Solaris

(PG-13)

Male

Female

Under 21

F

F

21 to 34

F

F

35 and Up

F

F

Battlefield Earth

(PG-13)

Male

Female

Under 21

B-

B

21 to 34

D-

D

35 and Up

D

D

No film, to my knowledge, has ever come close to
straight F's. That pretty much says it all. It was a bomb of nuclear
proportions, the likes of which we have never before seen. That's the
cake. The words below are just
frosting.

The great Soviet-era filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky had
an interesting career, the progress of which could be measured by the
speed at which his characters moved. In his great work of youthful
genius, Andrei Rublev, people walked at normal speed, on the ground,
swinging their arms naturally, in a path which moved directly toward
the target. Sometimes they ran, or even frolicked, when running was
appropriate. With each successive film, his characters moved farther
and farther from natural human behavior until, by the time he made
Nostalghia, all the characters moved as if they were in a processional in
some kind of Catholic liturgical rite, moving each foot only an inch
or two in front of the other, weighted down by some kind of spiritual
grief, taking indirect paths toward their target, or intentionally
walking through water when solid ground was available, never swinging
their arms but sometimes even carrying a candle ceremoniously.

In Andrei Rublev, people stand around in normal
configurations, as if they were people. In Nostalghia, people pose in
a stagy tableaux, as if acting in a 19th century theatrical
performance. In Andrei Rublev, when one
character asks a question, another responds naturally and rapidly. In
Nostalghia, when somebody asks a question, the other person stares out
of the window for a couple of minutes, then mutters a non-sequitur about
his dead mother. The first time I watched Nostalghia, I thought my DVD
player was broken because nothing moved. Then I realized that I could
still read the sub-titles if I played the film at 8x speed, and at
that speed the people move at exactly the right speed to duplicate
actual human movement. Since Tarkovsky doesn't really use any
background sound track except for dripping water noises, losing the
sound really makes no difference, thus making the film an excellent 15-20
minute watch at 8x speed. Unfortunately for most people, they have to
watch it at normal speed.

Based on Andrei Rublev, made when he was only 37,
Tarkovsky could have been the greatest filmmaker of them all, but he
gradually let the weight of ideas tip the balance against the weight
of simple humanity in his filmmaking, and the man who should have been
the Shakespeare of the cinema instead became a turtle-necked pretender
to artistic gravitas.

In 1972, only three years after he made the dazzling Andrei
Rublev, Tarkovsky made an intellectual s/f story called Solaris, which
was
about people in a remote space station who, for some reason never
really explained, create other living beings out of their
imaginations. In the case of the main character, he brings his dead
wife back from her suicide. This context provides the springboard for
pretentious long-winded discussions about the nature of reality, God,
nihilism, and various other philosophical issues. At that point in
Tarkovsky's career, his films did not yet require 8x speed on the DVD
player. He was in the 2x stage. The film is 165 minutes long, is in
Russian, has virtually no music or background noise, and the
characters move and speak at half speed. Therefore, it makes a fairly
good 83 minute movie if you play it at 2x speed. There is no problem
reading the sub-titles at that speed, because the characters take so
long to respond to one another. In fact, when you play the film at 2x, the
only thing wrong with it is that it looks cheesy, because there was no real attempt to create a feeling
of being in space.

Steven Soderbergh was nice enough to fix all that.
He remade the script closely, using a little more than half the
running time, added some scary monster chiller horror music, and spent
tens of millions of dollars to make it look like they were in space on
a real spaceship.

And the characters almost seem to be moving at
normal speed.

Almost.

Based upon my experimentation with the Tarkovsky
version, Soderbergh could have made the pace exactly right if he had
kept the first script but condensed it to 83 minutes.
Thus, it still seems quite slow at 98 minutes. By "quite slow", I mean
that if Ingmar Bergman watched it, he would be shouting, "get on with
it" at the screen -

- assuming he could stay awake long enough to get
that involved.

This was still a great improvement over Tarkovsky's
version in two ways:

1) it now looks good.

2) it will only bore you for 98 minutes
instead of 165.

Thank heaven for
DVD. I didn't even know there was any female nudity in this film,
but if you mess with the DVD long enough and get just the right
frames, then mess with those frames in photoshop for a while, you
get a clear look at Natascha McElhone's bum, and a possible look at
her left breast. Of course, with all that fucking around, it all
looks like shit, and McElhone (though extraordinarily beautiful in
an unusual way) is not voluptuous (flattest butt ever?)

.. but it is all visible.

And of course, there is Clooney's
butt, which makes two appearances. I'm sure you've been waiting for
that with bated breath.

The movie is a C-. If this movie were an
actress it would be Catherine Deneuve - incredibly beautiful, remote,
uninvolving, overrated by the critics

By the way, I don't recommend the
book. I just read it about two months ago, thinking that I might
better understand what's going on in the two Solaris movies. The book
is clumsy. It was written in Polish and has never been translated
directly from Polish to English. It was translated from Polish to
French, then French to English, and I doubt if either of the two steps
was done very well. There are indications that it was originally an
articulate and visionary story, but whatever literary merit it may
have had is gone, whatever eloquence it may have had has been garbled,
and whatever clarity it may have possessed is greatly diminished. I
would like to read it again if there is ever an acclaimed English
translation.

Back in 2000, Final Destination was kind of a surprise
mini-hit at the U.S. box office, with a $53 million domestic gate.
Critics didn't generally care for it, but I sorta enjoyed the
youth-targeted entry in the horror/slasher genre. It had a modicum of
ingenuity, maintained an ominous tone, and managed to pull off some
creative deaths which seemed to come jarringly out of nowhere. Oh,
sure, it used the same old basic formula, but at least it handled everything
pretty well.

In that first film, a teenager
pulled his friends off a plane based on a premonition that they would
all die. The plane did blow up, but ol' Mr Death was mighty ticked off
at being cheated, so he eventually caught up with them and killed them
in the same order in which they would have died if they had stayed in
their seats.

That Death has always been a sore loser! He makes
John McEnroe look as gracious and white-bread noble as Lou Gehrig.
Hell, he's still hacked off about losing that chess game in The
Seventh Seal.

This year's sequel takes place on the anniversary of that
plane crash. In the latest development, a young girl has a premonition
of a massive pile-up on the interstate highway, so she uses her car to
prevent her friends and some others from using the on-ramp. The
pile-up does occur, so she saves many lives, but Mr. Death is still being
a poor sport in the sequel, and he starts immediately to kill off the people who were
spared unduly.

Um ... assuming that makes sense to you so far, it pretty
much stops making sense there. The girl with the premonition goes to a
mental institution to visit the one girl who survived the airplane
incident in the original movie. (Ali Larter, who
appears in both films and should have a better career than this.)
Together, the girls go to visit that Candyman dude with the really low
voice, who is apparently in
this movie because his own horror series has run out of sequels. He's
supposed to be an expert in death, and they hope he will offer them
some advice on how to beat the curse. He mutters some profoundly
spooky stuff which makes little sense but sounds important, so the
survivors mull it over for the rest of the film. He tells them that "only a
new life can defeat death".

Does that mean they have to make babies? Does that
mean they need to update their old version of the Parker Brothers'
game of Life? Who knows? Before the survivors can figure out the
precise meaning of Candyman's advice, they come up with several
misinterpretations of the cryptic remarks, and most of them end up
dying in grotesque fashion - their bowels chopped out and their
nostrils raped and ... well, for the details, consult the Sir Robin
song in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, except that these people ARE
afraid to be killed in nasty ways.

Will any survive? You have to watch it to see.

The sequel does not have the talented Devon Sawa. It
has none of the jarring surprise engendered by the Rube Goldberg
deaths that marked the first film. It also has very little of the
macabre wit that powered the original, the only real exception
occurring in the very last ten seconds of the film. Mostly it just has
scenes which depict the explicit dismemberment, piercing,
decapitation, and fricasseeing of various humans, and the distribution
of their remains in unpleasant places. It includes many gruesome
details.

Although the original was a popular film with young audiences at
home and abroad, most critics hated it. I rather enjoyed that first
one in a guilty pleasure sense, but I didn't consider the sequel worth
watching. I don't really get into "grotesque and gruesome" as
stand-alone entertainment, but you might enjoy it if that is your
thing, because it is pretty slick, and it is rated a surprisingly high
6.3 at IMDb, so it has a strong following.

The big problem for Daredevil as a
comic book was that it had no really original hook. Oh, yeah, Matt
Murdock was blind, and he was a regular human being in terms of
physical strength, but when you really got down to the nitty-gritty,
a Daredevil comic was exactly the same as a Spiderman comic. Her had
special senses that told him when trouble was coming, he cavorted
around the rooftops of New York, he swung from place to place
Tarzan-style, he mourned for his lost parents, and he even fought
some of the same bad guys as Spiderman. After all, Daredevil was no
match for The Dread Dormammu or Galactus, so he had to fight
villains who were just normal guys like him - like Kingpin, for example.

Daredevil was the grade B Spiderman.

You might say the same for the movie. Some of the
special aerial action effects were excellent. Unfortunately I had seen them all
the previous summer in Spiderman. The only new spin in Daredevil is
that more action takes place at night. Two good reasons: (1)
Daredevil has a day job (2) a blind guy has advantages over sighted
people when it is completely dark.

Far above my expectations, there were
some moments in the film that I really enjoyed:

A beautifully storyboarded visual - a
bad guy runs from Daredevil at night, falls into a puddle. Sees the
reflection of Daredevil in the puddle, as the cowled one approaches
from overhead. Then, as the bad guy leaves, the camera stays on the
puddle, and Daredevil's feet plop down into the water. Very
dramatic, and a creative way to film the scene.

Daredevil uses his super-senses to
"see" Jennifer Garner as raindrops fall off of her. He can pick up
the shape of her face from the sounds of the raindrops, because his
hearing is not really hearing as we experience it, but something
like a Dolphin's sonar.

The police inspector tells the
smart-ass reporter (Joey Pants, one of the best things about the
movie) that there is no reason to think Daredevil was involved in a
situation, or even to believe that Daredevil exists. The reporter
flicks his cigarette butt insouciantly into a puddle of gasoline,
which flames up into a giant "DD" symbol. Pants says nothing, just
looks at the cop. It could have been overplayed very easily, but
they made it very cool, and it was very well done. Joey Pants's role
was poorly written. He had some rhetorical and corny lines to
deliver, but he read them all credibly and seemed like a real person. Joey Pants is rapidly
joining Samuel L Jackson and Sam Elliott in my pantheon of character
actors who should be in every movie.

Daredevil (Ben Affleck) and Bullseye
(Colin Farrell) do a great fight scene on a giant pipe organ in a
cathedral.

There were also some things that
really bugged me. I know that comic book stories are not supposed to
be completely logical, but once they establish their world and ask
me to buy into the premise, they have
an obligation to hold it together consistently, and provide some
normal level of continuity. Didn't happen.

The "origin" story goes on way too long, and
features one of the silliest scenes ever. Little pre-Daredevil is
running through Hell's Kitchen when he passes a storefront with
hundreds of barrels outside, all being loaded on a truck. All of the
barrels say "Biohazard". Do you want to know that midtown Manhattan is
filled with factories that are storing barrels of biohazardous waste
on the streets in 19th century beer barrels? Or maybe that isn't
waste. Maybe there are factories in midtown Manhattan which are
actually manufacturing biohazards and shipping them out in beer
barrels. If so, they should do this across the river in North Jersey,
where a spill would never even be noticed.

After Daredevil and Bullseye have
their first fight, Daredevil escapes on the rooftops to a cathedral.
Bullseye, who is a completely earthbound tough Irish street brawler,
tracks him there.
(Bullseye's superpower - he can throw any object with fatal accuracy,
including baseball cards, condoms, water balloons, and hangnails). How
exactly did Bullseye manage to track a guy who swings
across rooftops?

Although Daredevil has absolutely no
trouble defeating a room full of maybe twenty tough thugs with
firearms, he gets his ass kicked by a 120 pound woman with a lot of
martial arts training, but no special powers of any kind.

Daredevil is stabbed through the
chest by a blade which pierces all the way through his body and out
his back. He recovers from this wound enough to defeat two bad guys
in hand-to-hand combat the same night - even after one of them cuts
his windpipe! Not only is there no explanation for how Daredevil
could have such recuperative powers, but there is no explanation for
why his pretty burgundy uniform has no tears in the front where the
knife went in, or in the back where the knife went out. 'Tis a
mystery.

Daredevil comes off in some scenes as
an insane vigilante. He loses a case in court, and an accused rapist
goes free, so Daredevil does what the law would not do, and kills
the guy the night after the trial. This might have worked if the
audience really had a chance to hate the rapist, but we don't even
know whether the guy is guilty. Daredevil acts like a petulant
schoolyard bully who doesn't get his way. "Well, if I can't beat you
in court with my brains, I'll just beat you up."

A little more comic relief from Jon Favreau as
Daredevil's law partner might also have been good. This film tended
to take itself seriously, and it didn't have the grotesque and
creative Tim Burton world-view to justify that noir atmosphere.
Spiderman was just much more fun than this movie

I guess the bottom line is that the film has some
good comic book moments, but it would have seemed more impressive if
it could have come out before Spiderman. It ends up where Daredevil always ends
up.

Señor Skin 'caps of the beautiful Mexican actress topless and showing just a hint of pubes (links 2 and 4) in scenes from "La Mujer de Benjamín" (1991).

Pat Reeder www.comedy-wire.com

Pat's comments in yellow...

SINGER ACCIDENTALLY SPARKS DANCE CRAZE
Yes, We Must Think For Ourselves! - Pop singer Dannii Minogue, sister of
Kylie, was performing a concert by a lake near Tamworth, England, when she
saw a boat capsize. She tried to alert the crowd by frantically waving and
pointing at the lake to get them to turn around. But the crowd thought she
was trying to start a new dance craze and began waving their arms and
pointing back at her. Minogue said she was about to stop singing and shout
for help when she saw the boater climb safely back onto his boat.

She was going to shout, "Help, help!" And the crowd would shout back,
"Help, help!"

Apparently, Dannii Minogue gets the fans who are too dumb to be Kylie
Minogue fans.

STALIN TRIED TO KILL JOHN WAYNE
Fill Your Hand, You SOB! - British historian Michael Mann told The Sun
newspaper that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered KGB hitmen to try to
kill John Wayne. Stalin saw Wayne's tough, American, anti-communist image
as being as dangerous to the USSR as the atom bomb, and feared that Wayne's
popularity would thwart his plans for global communism. The plan got as
far as two Ukrainians breaking into Wayne's dressing room at Warner
Brothers in 1943, where the FBI ambushed them. After Stalin died, Nikita
Kruschev called off the plan because Wayne was his favorite actor.